The Pursuit of Southern History: Presidential Addresses of the Southern Historical Association, 1935-1963, and: Southern History in the Making: Pioneer Historians of the South (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Pursuit of Southern History: Presidential Addresses of the Southern Historical Association, 1935-1963. Edited by George Brown Tindall . (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964. Pp xxi, 541. $8.50.) Southern History in the Making: Pioneer Historians of the South. By Wendell Holmes Stephenson. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964. Pp ix, 294. $7.50.) The genteel tradition survives in historical writing about the South long after it has everywhere else given way. Southern history is like the South itself in its resistance to innovation; and since southern history is still written mostly by southerners, it is not surprising that this should be so. Nothing about the current state of southern historical writing is surprising except the success with which it has carried on its fight, its rear-guard action against novelty. The presidential addresses lovingly gathered together by Professor TindaH collectively constitute a manifesto against change in the interpretation of history (as well as against change in history itself). Francis Butler Simkins best expresses the program toward which practically all of his colleagues seem to be groping. He frankly urges southern historians to "tolerate the South's past" and to preserve it inviolate against the assault of revisionism. I quote at random from Professor Simkins' remarkable address: "Our historians should explain or justify these supposed deficiencies of the South by showing that its genius is rural, not urban. . . ." "The true southerner should take pride in the fact that his section's fame is based on tobacco, hogs, rice, and cotton, and that its greatest man is the country gentleman. . . ." "Our chroniclers of the past should quit being ashamed of the cloud of illiteracy which once hung over their province." "The dark spot on southern civilization of denying formal education to the slaves can be wiped out by an understanding of what was accomplished in the so-called school of the plantation in which the barbarian captive from Africa was Anglicized." What is striking here and in all these essays is the undiminished insistence that the historian be also a southerner—be a southerner, indeed, before he is anything else. This volume is an echo of that earlier manifesto, TH Take My Stand. Thirty-five years ago Donald Davidson found it "astonishing" that southern writers "should adopt somebody else's geography and contrarily write like Northerners." Simkins and his colleagues are making the same point about southern historians. Even C. Vann Woodward's well284 known essay "The Irony of Southern History," reprinted here, is simply a more sophisticated version of the same theme: the southern heritage (seen, in this case, as the tragic heritage of defeat) represents a fund of experience distinct from the history of the rest of the country, and it is the responsibility of the southern historian to cherish and preserve it Woodward would doubtless balk at the suggestion that the southern historian must not only preserve the southern tradition but defend it—"explain or justify" it, in Simkins' words. But the point is that this obsession with southern uniqueness continues to obscure the important question of whether or not the "southern tradition" had any basis in social reality in the first place. It continues to assume what needs to be subjected to analysis. It assumes that the South was feudal rather than capitalistic, aristocratic rather than bourgeois, when the validity of these assumptions is precisely what needs to be tested before the history of the South can begin to be written. Elkins and McKitrick have argued that slavery can only be understood by considering "the dynamics of unopposed capitalism," and not only slavery but all the questions of southern—and national—history depend, for their interpretation, on whether one considers the ante bellum South as a precapitalist or capitalistic society. To assume that the "southern tradition" describes actual conditions is to prejudice the whole investigation from the outset. Of Southern History in the Making, it need be said only that it reveals the same doting absorption in the South and things southern that characterizes southern scholarship in general. Christopher Lasch University of Iowa Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia. By Robert McColley. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964. Pp. viii, 227. $5.00.) In...